London calling

“It was a dark and cold December morning and I had the alarm set for 5:20 AM. It was a really early wake-up, but I managed to get up, take a shower, grab my bag and head towards the Helsinki Central Railway Station to meet up with Alessandro. We were both excited to go to London and to attend our first development-related event. We took the train and the destination was London via the Helsinki-Vantaa Airport.”

How we got introduced to Flutter

Our fellow mobile developer Iiro showed us this new framework in early 2018. What is this mystical framework for making beautiful applications for both iOS and Android with the same codebase? What is this Dart-programming language?

There were a lot of questions, but without any preconceptions, we began our Flutter journey. We fell in love how easy it was to make amazing UI’s using Flutter and how fast it was to develop with a help of hot reload.

We made an official event application with Flutter for the Finnish student recruitment fair called TalentIT in cooperation with Aalto University. The idea behind the FairMate for TalentIT 2018 event application was to provide the students with a tool to make their recruitment fair experience easier by helping them to identify the companies that would suit them the most. They could rate the exhibiting companies based on their visit, check the fair map and write private notes, so they could go through them after the fair, and apply for a job from the ones with a positive image. That was our first real project using Flutter and we learned a lot from it.

Flutter tourists

We were excited to visit Flutter Live, but on the other hand, we didn’t know what to expect. There was no information about the announcements or the keynote. What is happening? Google wouldn’t organize this event if the announcements wouldn’t be big. Flutter 1.0? New IDE for Flutter? A release of the Fuchsia phone? In the end, we just stopped guessing and we were ready for everything.

Alex loves London and was happy it had been chosen to be the city where the event was held. Alex has been in London a few times, but for Alessandro, this was the first time, so he got a private guide who took him around the magnificent city!

Before we could check-in to our hotel, we had time to work, so we found a nice Starbucks from Covent Garden. What else developers need than free wifi and good coffee? After working for a bit we took the tube to our hotel and got ready for the event.

How did we get the tickets to Flutter Live? You might ask. Google had a form to apply for the tickets. We both applied and some weeks later we got a confirmation email from Google that we got the tickets.

It was a great opportunity to use Codemate’s Operation Wombat. It is a way to attend conferences and events with the company paying the expenses.

The acceptance process of Operation Wombat took only a couple of days. We spoke to our site manager Miika about the event. He was excited about the opportunity and told us to write a marketing plan, figure out the budget and schedule of the trip. Once done, we talked to our communications manager, Sanna, and got her approval for the marketing plan. Next day we got green light for our operation, so we started to buy plane tickets.

In our opinion, our internal Operation Wombat process was a flexible way to decide on event participation, and we are happy that it made our trip to the event possible.

The event was held in the London Science Museum and it was pretty awesome. There was a showcase-wall filled with Flutter applications, interviews, a catch-a-dash game for picking up your own Dart bird plushie, a Flutter hot-reload game to challenge our team spirit and plenty of refreshments. The keynote was held in the Science Museum’s iMax theater, and let me say the screen was gigantic! You can watch the keynote from here.

What’s new

After 10 months since its beta announcement, Flutter 1.0 was finally announced at the Flutter Live 2018 and it is not coming with empty hands. During the Flutter Live event, we got the chance to hear about the new tools and features the Google team (and the community) has been working on in the past months: Flare, Codemagic, two Square SDKs, Desktop Embedding (on Mac, Linux and Windows), Hummingbird and much more.

Flareis a new design tool to create animations that can later be manipulated by Flutter, it reduces the amount of time and steps needed to go from a design idea to a final embedded animation within the app. The 2Dimensions team has done an incredible job, and now with Nima (their 2D characters animation tool) and Flare the limit is only the designer’s creativity.

It’s hard to say which announcement hyped us the most, they were all great but Flare owns a special mention cause it enriches the design, development and user experience in an innovative way.

Nevercode announced Codemagic, continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) tool designed for Flutter to simplify the automation process of building and releasing apps. It allows us to select a Flutter project from GitHub, create continuous builds and generate release versions for Android and iOS within just a few clicks.

Square, a popular payment service, announced two Flutter SDKs enabling Flutter applications to accept payments either in-person using the Square reader or by taking payments from a mobile app. We were able to get early access to the latter SDK and test it, and we feel it will close even more the gap between native and Flutter applications now that we can rely on a safe and quick in-app payment method.

Flutter is not only mobile

Despite being primarily targeted for iOS and Android, Flutter has been built as a portable UI toolkit that can be used on every device with a screen.

Flutter Desktop Embedding is a project aimed to bring Flutter to desktop operating systems such as macOS, Windows and Linux. Few days before the conference, Chinmay Grade, a Google engineer part of the Flutter team, published an article where he demonstrated how to make Flutter run on a Raspberry Pi, proving that it can also run on not-so-powerful devices.

Last but not least, the Flutter team surprised us with Hummingbird: an early-stage web runtime for Flutter. What does that mean? Web applications written with Flutter and then compiled to run in a browser like every other website you visit every day. We all have been asking for it but no one expected it would have come true so soon.

Summary of the event

We liked the event very much and it was organized well, thanks Google! The best part of the event was not only the announcements but the atmosphere and talking with different fellow Flutter developers. Flutter community is really awesome and we met many nice people. There was a lot of new amazing tools announced that we are super excited to use in our projects. These new changes also give us new ways to think the design of mobile applications.

It is important for us at Codemate to get to know the latest trends and hot topics. If you want to work with the latest technologies or maybe you would like to be at the next event with us. We are looking for more mates here.